Rochester named 10th-smartest city in U.S.
(buffalo came in 42)
Your teacher was wrong. You can get smarter just by showing up.The Rochester region did it this week when it made an impressive intellectual leap from 26th on The Daily Beast’s 2009 list of America’s smartest cities all the way up to 10th, supplanting Baltimore, which fell to 20th.
New York City, the city that never sleeps, ate Rochester’s dust, coming in 16th, and Buffalo was far down the list at No. 42.
Boston came in first, with the Hartford-New Haven region second.
Los Angeles stumbled in 31st, just ahead of St. Louis. If you’re wondering how Las Vegas scored, remember that when they talk about chips in Vegas, they aren’t thinking about microprocessors. Vegas ranked 55th and last among the nation’s metro areas with at least 1 million residents.
Fresno, Calif., which was last in 2009, is now third from last, which saves it from dumbest but not from dumb, in the words of The Daily Beast, the online news and opinion journal.
The publication’s second annual “America’s Smartest (and Dumbest) Cities” was based on data organized on a per-capita basis so that larger cities didn’t get an advantage.
The criteria basically assessed a community’s educational and intellectual culture. The number of residents over 25 with bachelor’s and advanced degrees was compared with the overall number of residents over 25.
The Daily Beast also looked at sales of nonfiction books to get a handle on, well, bookishness, and threw in the number of institutions of higher learning and public libraries.
The five-county Rochester metropolitan statistical area scored well, with 19 percent of residents holding bachelor’s degrees and 13 percent with graduate degrees.
According to booksellers’ data, 750,000 nonfiction titles were sold in this area so far this year to a population of a little over 1 million.
According to The Daily Beast’s explanation of the criteria, the weight afforded certain categories was changed this year. Voter turnout was dropped in favor of libraries per capita. Advanced degrees were given more emphasis, as were the number of institutions of higher learning.
The ranking, and leap forward, cheered community leaders Monday.
“Any time you can have third-party endorsement of your intellectual diversity, it’s a good thing,” said Mark Peterson, CEO of Greater Rochester Enterprise.
“We scored well because of our relative high number of residents with B.A.s and advanced degrees.”
Anne Kress, president of Monroe Community College, called Rochester “an innovative and engaged community with access to the full spectrum of dynamic higher education institutions.”
“I’m a transplant here,” said John Burdick, dean of admissions and financial aid at the University of Rochester.
“I think Rochester’s just great, with so much going on, so many cultural icons. We should appreciate ourselves more than we do.”
